Guy Coble Named Check Point Partner Security Engineer of the Year for ANZ | S5

At the 2026 Check Point SE Summit, Check Point named S5 Technology Group Managing Director Guy Coble as its Partner Security Engineer of the Year for Australia and New Zealand. This post covers what sits behind the award, what the summit program involved, and what this kind of recognition means when you are choosing who runs your Check Point environment.

The award is a recognition from Check Point to a security engineer in its channel, and this year it landed on our Managing Director. Below, what sits behind it and why it is worth writing up.

Two decades with Check Point

Guy has worked with the Check Point platform for nearly two decades and is one of the first holders of Check Point Security Master Elite certification in ANZ. This award adds a regional recognition on top of that history.

Longevity with a single platform matters in security engineering. Firewall, VPN and threat prevention value rarely comes from short engagements. It comes from engineers who have seen a platform through many versions, many architectures and many late-night troubleshooting sessions, and who can be trusted with the design decisions that outlast a product cycle.

The summit program

The 2026 SE Summit ran for four days and brought partner security engineers together with the Check Point team and the wider partner SE community. The program combined hands-on training, certification sittings and roadmap sessions covering where the platform is heading.

Our security engineer Joel Rue joined Guy for the full four days and took part in the training and certification program alongside him. The roadmap sessions feed directly into how we plan Check Point designs, migrations and upgrades for customers over the coming year, so the summit works twice: once as recognition, and once as a working investment in the team.

What Elite status means

S5 Technology Group is Check Point’s most-certified Elite Partner in Australia and the only fully Australian-owned and operated Check Point Elite Partner. The most-certified claim refers to the certifications held across our engineering team relative to other Elite partners in the country. Vendor tiers are easy to put on a website and easy to let drift. The SE of the Year award is a useful external check on that claim: the vendor recognised one of our senior engineers individually, in front of the regional partner community, while the Elite tier itself rests on certifications held across the whole team.

What this means for customers

If you run a Check Point estate, or are evaluating it, the practical questions are simple. Can the partner’s engineers configure the platform correctly the first time? Do they hold current certifications rather than ones from a previous product generation? Will the people who design your perimeter still understand it in three years?

This award answers the first question with a vendor’s own recognition. Joel’s four days at the summit answer the second. And a Managing Director with nearly two decades on the platform, mentoring the next certified engineer in the firm, is a reasonable answer to the third.

It was another fantastic APAC SE summit held by Check Point this year and it was great to expose another of our security engineers to the deep technical training provided at these events. It was also very pleasing to receive the individual recognition as Security Engineer of the Year for ANZ.

Guy Coble, Managing Director of S5 Technology Group

Congratulations, Guy, from all of us at S5, and thanks to the Check Point team for the summit.